On December 17, Instagram said it now has the right to sell users’ photos and it can put users’ photos in ads too.This move caused a widespread revolt among the users and few hours ago Instagram backed off from its earlier plight.
On December 17, Instagram said it has the perpetual right to sell users’ photographs without payment or notification. It claimed to have the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency. It was also said that the new intellectual property policy would take effect on January 16. Such a move sparked an outburst among users. Many of the social network’s users threatened Instagram to stop using the service and delete their accounts.
But the interesting thing is Instagram had no such plans about selling users photo. The language of the new Terms of Service of Instagram confused the users. The language used in Instagram’s new Terms of Service sounded like the social network could allow users’ photos to be part of advertisements and share photos in social networking sites. This caused a widespread revolt among the users. Hence, on December 18, Instagram’s co-founder Kevin Systrom wrote in a blog post that Instagram has no plans to sell users’ photos and it will remove language from its new terms of service.
Added to these, Systrom assured users that Instagram won’t do such things that users don’t want. Besides, it’ll fix any mistakes on the social network’s part. That’s not all. Instagram will never sell people’s photos to others without compensating the photographers.
Systrom clearly wrote, “This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear – It is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”
It is expected that Instagram will update its Terms of Service very soon.
Source: Instagram Blog-1, Instagram Blog-2
Thanks To: CNET, Los Angeles Times
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